the science of stars
by kathillards
Summary: "Secrets," her mother once tells her, "are necessary for people like us." —- Kendall and superheroes and sisters deep in space.


**notes:** well, somebody had to write the fic where kendrix and kendall are sisters, right? i did the math and it's probably correct, so kendall would have been ten during lost galaxy. probably. so, we're going with that.

this fic is pretty much just me finally writing down my headcanons for kendall, her past, why she runs the museum, stuff like that. hints of shelby/kendall, too, if you squint. if you're not down with that, i suggest you don't read.

p.s. i've been publishing more of my fics exclusively on archiveofourown, as it's generally a better environment for fic writing than this site. i'll still cross-post some, but a lot of my newer work is solely on there. if you want, you can find me there under the username _kathillards_.

* * *

 **the science of stars**

 _the delicate beginning rush_  
 _the feeling you can know so much_  
 _without knowing anything at all_

— taylor swift, come back be here

* * *

"Secrets," her mother once tells her, "are necessary for people like us."

What she means is: _rich_ and _powerful_ and _elite._

What Kendall hears is: _isolated_ and _lonely_ and _alone._

It all means the same thing in the end: keep secrets from the people you want to love, and eventually, they'll leave.

-:-

Her father leaves when she is nine years old. He hadn't been like them – born into wealth and power and prestige. Her mother's family ran business empires and started museums and universities and ruled the world. Her father had come from the streets, worked his way up, and charmed her mother into a whirlwind romance and shotgun wedding at twenty.

He leaves them eighteen years later, sick and tired of a life lived in frost and glamour, of the men still vying for her mother's hand – of the men _winning_ her mother's hand, despite the rings on them.

The next year, her sister gets a on a ship headed for the stars.

Kendall watches her leave and has never hated the sky so much.

-:-

Her sister calls, sometimes. The government gave families of the departing citizens of Terra Venture a special phone from NASADA that would let them contact their family members no matter where in the universe they are. Kendall keeps it in her room because her mother doesn't care.

Usually, she's too busy with whatever they're doing up there. Kendall wouldn't know, though she watches the news stories about the Lost Galaxy rangers and imagines she can see her sister beneath the pink suit. She never asks, and Kendrix doesn't tell. _Secrets are necessary for people like us._ Somehow, though, she doesn't think that's why Kendrix won't tell her.

Until the day she gets a call and it's not Kendrix on the other side.

"Kendall?" asks a boy – and he must be a boy, even though he's much older than her, Kendrix's age, but he looks young and sad and lost – with dark hair and a red shirt. "Kendall Morgan?"

"That's me," she says, setting aside her homework. "Is something wrong? Kendrix usually – "

The look on his face at her sister's name makes her heart stop. Words die in her throat. "No," she whispers, and he swallows and looks down, but he doesn't deny it. He can't deny it.

"I'm so sorry," he murmurs. "It was our fault."

Kendall grips her pencil so tightly it breaks. "Can you tell me something?"

He blinks at her – his eyes are shining, wet with tears, but she doesn't care. "Yes?"

"Was she a power ranger?"

He freezes. It's enough of an answer. She amends her question to, "Are _you_ a power ranger, too?"

"She was pink," he admits slowly. "I'm red."

Kendall presses the button to hang up. She's ten years old and she knows a lot of things, but she knows this most of all: she _hates_ the power rangers.

-:-

She hates a lot of things, in the months after Kendrix dies out amongst the stars. She hates space, she hates NASADA, she hates Terra Venture, she hates Leo Corbett. She hates funerals and people crying and her mother daintily wiping her tears away with some sleazy man's pocket square. She hates her father, when he shows up to the memorial service. And she hates the power rangers.

"I hope you're doing all right," he says, awkward and hesitant, when he finds her after the service. "I'm sorry I couldn't be there. I wish – "

Kendall turns away.

Her father sighs and adds quietly, "I love you, Kendall. And I know your sister did, too."

"But you both _left_ ," Kendall throws the words at him, ten years old and full off too much sadness and loneliness and anger to be polite anymore. "You both _left me_."

Her mother sweeps her away before her father can say another word. She lets the limousine driver take her back home, to the mansion on the hill where she grew up alone, where her grandmother is waiting with tea and cookies and stories to lull her to sleep.

She hates the mansion. She hates the stories – her mother as a child, her sister as a child, life growing up on the prairie in the 1960s until her grandmother married a handsome businessman because he fell in love with a girl on a horse who told him he was going the wrong way.

She hates fairytales. She hates love stories, and superhero stories, and tragedies. And most of all, she hates her sister.

She hates her even more when she comes back.

-:-

"I missed you," Kendrix sighs happily over the hologram screen, bright and shining and _alive_. Kendall stares at her, at the figures of Leo and – and someone, another girl in yellow, two other boys, a girl in pink who must have taken over after her sister died, but she doesn't know any of their names – in the background, cheering and laughing, and Kendrix looks so happy, Kendall can't bring herself to say anything she's thinking.

 _I missed you but you left me you went to the stars without me you became a superhero and you never told me and you died and I missed you I missed you I missed you but you_ left _why did you leave why did you have to leave?_

She knows why, though. Knows that Kendrix couldn't stand living in their glittering mansion with its empty rooms and their absent father and their mother's lovers anymore. Knows that Kendrix always dreamed of the stars, of science and astronomy, of making a difference. Smart enough to make it to the moon on her own, kind enough to help other people get there with her.

So she doesn't say anything. Kendrix hesitates, then asks, "How is Mom?"

It's like nothing's changed. Like she didn't fly off into space and become a superhero and _die_. Like she didn't come back from the dead. Like she didn't save the world.

"Mom is fine," Kendall says after a moment and Kendrix's smile brightens like she actually believes her, and then she drags over her best friends – her teammates – her new family – over to meet the little sister she abandoned on Earth.

If she notices the way Maya and Kendrix look at each other, touch each other, smile at each other, she doesn't say anything then, either. Her mother says secrets are necessary, but Kendrix isn't keeping any, not anymore.

In the stars, her sister has found freedom. The only one left keeping secrets is the sister still on the ground.

-:-

She has never told her mother that she likes girls. Sometimes, she thinks she already knows. Katherine Morgan is a shrewd woman, and not much gets past her. But she never brings it up, so Kendall doesn't either.

They all know Kendrix likes girls, but it's one of those things nobody talks about, the way they don't talk about how Kendrix was so sick of their family and their house and missing her father that she left the solar system. She had always been smart enough that people cared little about who she loved, and she had always been smart enough not to give them a chance to talk about it.

Kendall isn't that smart, not yet, maybe not ever, so she just doesn't say anything. Bottles up her crush on Jenny Robinson from the playground and smiles politely when her mother introduces her to handsome, smiling, obscenely wealthy boy after boy as she grows up.

High school is harder – she's enrolled in a private all-girls academy, and there are all sorts of rumors flying about who had sex with the boys from their brother school and who prefers girls and, in the end, Kendall finds she prefers her books and her research to both boys and girls.

But it's still hard. Her grandmother tells her more fairytale stories of the way she and her grandfather met, all those years ago, when life was simpler and her last name didn't carry as much weight as it does, but all she can think of are the string of lovers that parade in and out of her mother's bedroom, all she can think of is the wedding ring tucked away in a drawer somewhere, all she can think of is how much she doesn't want any of that.

Besides, boys are gross. Girls are better, but not by much. Kendall buries herself in dinosaur fossils and business classes and forgets about making friends or anything more entirely.

-:-

"At least I have one daughter who prefers to stay close to the ground," her mother laughs her old thoughts out loud, years later, with her socialite friends, the tea party group, the book club where all they read is Jane Austen and gossip about their children's love lives. Kendall hates them all, has since she was seven.

"I think she'll do very well taking over our museum," her grandmother says with a kindly smile, an all-knowing twinkle in her eyes. She's the only family member who's ever asked Kendall about her science research. "She's disciplined and driven. Has she decided where she's going to college?"

Kendall tucks away the acceptance letters from Yale and Harvard and Princeton beneath her pillow. Just because she knows she has to follow in her family's footsteps – just because _somebody_ has to, one daughter has to – doesn't mean she has to tell them right away.

At least her grandmother will be proud of her. Her mother just waves her hand, golden bracelets clinking, and says, "Of course you did, darling, who wouldn't accept you? You're a _Morgan_."

-:-

Most days, she's glad to have her mother's last name. She doesn't want a leftover accessory from the man who broke her family. Other days, she remembers that only half of it was his fault, and she hates her mother's name. Hates the family name. She still hates a lot of things, even, on bad days, her sister.

Some days she stands in front of a mirror, all of eighteen with a bright future ahead of her, and imagines having her father's last name. Imagines being somebody else. The daughter of a street urchin who married an heiress, instead of the daughter of an heiress who married a street urchin. She wonders if she would be different, if her last name was different.

But her mother had been an only child, and her father couldn't protest to her grandfather insisting upon them carrying on the family name. It's in all the documents. Buildings in three universities named after her family. Five museums that thank the Morgan family for their generous donations. The name is a stamp on her forehead, one she can't rub off, even if she knew how to try.

Kendrix knew how to try. Kendrix took a space ship to another planet where nobody knows the name _Morgan_ , and Kendrix found a new home, and Kendrix made her own name.

Kendall doesn't know how. As she gets older, she's starting to realize she doesn't know as many things as she'd thought.

-:-

She definitely doesn't know how to react when a pretty brunette girl from her economics class asks her out for coffee. Her name is Anna, she smiles like the sun, and she sits in front of Kendall in class and the lights dance off her chocolate brown curls like they're doing a ballet.

Kendall doesn't know how to ask if it's a date, but she doesn't have to – Anna walks her home to her apartment off campus and kisses her on the doorstep, shy and sweet, like something out of a love story.

She still kind of hates love stories, but maybe they're not that bad.

-:-

"Darling," her mother says in her senior year, over brunch at their house with a buffet of food that Kendall has forgotten how to pronounce, "have you given any thought to what you're going to do after graduation?"

Kendall frowns. Surely, her mother knows, that she plans on working in one of the many family businesses – her grandfather's company, maybe her uncle's university, or one of their many museums across the country. What else is the last remaining Earthbound daughter of the Morgans going to do?

"Marriage," her mother presses, which is an entirely different conversation, and one Kendall is not at all prepared for. "There are several boys in our social circle who are around your age, very handsome, I'm sure you've met them, and they would certainly love to ask for your hand."

Kendall pushes her plate away. "I don't want to get married," she says, and her mother sighs deeply, as if this is the most disappointing news of them all. Kendall doesn't really feel hungry anymore.

-:-

She takes a job at the furthest possible family museum she can, just to avoid disappointing her grandma, putting just in enough of an effort to make her mother proud. But she's far, far away from the glitz and glamour of New York, settled into a bright seaside town on the opposite coast, where Amber Beach Museum can take up just enough of her time that she doesn't feel guilty for avoiding her mother's phone calls – or her sister's phone calls from a different planet.

She does call her grandmother every weekend, and Anna until they decide to break up because long-distance isn't really their thing, but that's it. At Amber Beach, she builds her own reputation – smart, focused, efficient. She takes classes to get her master's degree in her free time and works her way up the corporate ladder, impressing all the people her grandfather had assigned to the museum, until she's basically running it herself.

They start calling her _Miss Morgan_ when she earns their respect. After a time, it stops being about her family. She finds she likes it more than she thought she would. Maybe this little museum tucked away between a volcano and the sea can be her Mirinoi.

-:-

Then the Armada invades Earth, and she meets an alien who tells her that he needs her help looking for sparkly gemstones before evil aliens get their hands on it, and her whole world starts to dissolve. She panics, at first, because she's not Kendrix, she doesn't know how to be a superhero, she doesn't know the first thing about aliens or other planets or ancient sources of magical powers. She doesn't know anything about _Kendrix's_ world.

All she knows are dinosaurs – the Earth beneath her feet and the bones buried beneath it. All she knows are business empires and how to be alone and how to hate things. But the planet is under attack and there's no time for second-guessing – she could be dead in the morning.

So, she agrees to help. And she calls her grandmother a little more often. And she calls her mother and talks for more than two minutes. She doesn't spill her secrets – _Mom, I met an alien and he wants my help to save the world; Mom, I'm searching for gemstones that were made 65 million years ago; Mom, I'm doing incredible things just like Kendrix but you didn't care about hers so why would you care about mine?_

Like her mother says, secrets are necessary. She calls Kendrix up at last and confides in her about the invasion and Keeper and the gemstones and Kendrix smiles at her like she's finally a sister to be proud of.

"You're going to make an amazing superhero, Kendall," she says, and Kendall wants to protest – _I'm not a superhero, I'm not like you, I'm just smart and Keeper found me first_ – but Kendrix wouldn't listen to her denials, so she doesn't say them. "If you need me, I'll fly to Earth as soon as I can, okay?"

Kendall sighs. "If the world doesn't end first."

Kendrix laughs. "The world won't end. You have power rangers, don't you?"

And they do.

-:-

She's kept up with the ever-changing power rangers teams all across the country, ever since she knew her sister became one off in the far reaches of space. All the way up to the current team – Megaforce, or maybe Super Megaforce; she's not sure what their official name is.

What she does know is that they have a pink, and sometimes, she wears Kendrix's suit, and it's _weird_.

But Kendrix would be proud, probably, of these kids – and Kendall knows they're kids, far younger than her, from the way they stand and talk and laugh, like best friends in high school – and the way they fight and how they wear their colors, her color, her team's colors with pride.

Kendall watches the pink ranger call on her sister's powers, and somewhere inside her, there's a ten-year-old girl who aches for the chance to be with her big sister on a spaceship heading for the stars. A ten-year-old girl who lost her sister to those powers, to a sad boy in the same shade of red as the new red ranger who couldn't look her in the eye when he told her that her sister was dead. A ten-year-old girl who hated the power rangers, but loved them, too, when her sister came back because of their strength and magic.

Keeper tells her that the energems will transform anyone who bonds with them into power rangers. She eyes the ten empty spots in their base and feels a strange kind of longing bubble up inside her.

-:-

The world doesn't end. It almost does, but before that happens, she and Keeper find a caveman frozen in ice with a gem in his hands that glows bright blue, and then a boy in black shows up at the museum door and she has to offer him a job, even though all he does is flirt with every girl passing by, because he's got the black gem and he wants to help.

Chase tries to flirt with her, too, until she tells him, in no uncertain terms, that she is his boss and, even if she wasn't, she doesn't swing that way. He's decent enough to back off, and even kind enough to start becoming her friend, slowly. Him and Koda brighten up the base considerably, always laughing and joking off. Kendall comes to appreciate them, no matter how annoying they can get.

It's a nice change from just her and Keeper. He barely shows up these days, anyway, always out searching for energems while she and the boys conduct undercover museum digs for the same purpose.

And then the Armada attacks in full.

-:-

Chase comes to the base that day, for safety and for the news coverage of the battle that she's got playing in high-def. She and Koda are already there, though Keeper is nowhere to be found, and the sounds of the battle raging across the world echo over their heads.

"Think we're all gonna die?" Chase asks, voice light, but his words worried. Koda looks at her with wide eyes; she's not sure how she came to be their pseudo big sister, especially since one of them is a hundred thousand years old, but here she is.

"No," she says with absolute certainty. "The power rangers will save us."

"We are power rangers," Koda says slowly, like he's puzzling out the thought. "Why we not fight?"

Kendall doesn't have an immediate answer. Emperor Mavro dies at the hands of the Megaforce rangers, only for all his armies to descend upon them.

"It's not our fight yet," she says softly, part of her wondering exactly _when_ her fight will be. But she knows it's not yet. It's Megaforce's fight. The quarry fills with rangers – this part, she knows, won't be on the news, but she has cameras all over Harwood to keep track of alien activity.

Her heart jumps when she sees the Lost Galaxy rangers, but when the pink one takes off her helmet, it's not her sister. Chase and Koda don't seem to notice her reaction, their eyes glued to the screen as the final battle unfolds before their eyes.

Kendall doesn't know whether to be relieved or disappointed. Before she can blink, it's over, and the Galaxy rangers are gone before she can even ask them any questions. She turns off the screens and looks at Chase and Koda.

"Come on," she says, "we've got work to do."

-:-

A new girl starts waitressing at the Dino Bite Café. Kendall signs off on her hiring without thinking twice – she's young, energetic, and passionate. Maybe not about serving food, but about dinosaurs, at least. Koda takes a liking to her and the way she makes Bronto Burgers, which, in hindsight, she should have seen as a warning sign.

"Why don't you like me, Miss Morgan?" she asks once, plaintively, probably too tired from her closing shift to filter herself (not that she ever did so normally). Kendall looks around the café with a sigh.

"I do like you, Shelby," she admits. "I just can't let you go on professional museum digs with us. It's not personal."

Shelby frowns, rubbing her eyes. "It feels personal," she complains. "How will you know what I'm capable of if you don't give me a chance to prove myself?"

"You can prove yourself by locking up tonight and showing up for job on time tomorrow," Kendall says firmly and turns to leave, her clipboard clutched firmly in one hand.

"I would always be on time if I got to dig up dinosaur bones instead of serving dinosaur chicken nuggets," Shelby grumbles, but not heatedly, probably too tired to actually engage with Kendall. She starts moving towards the door to lock up, and Kendall steps outside the café to watch her do it.

"Is your plan to work your way up from serving tables to being a paleontologist?" Kendall can't help asking sarcastically as Shelby turns the key with a click.

She looks over her shoulder and for a minute her usual smile brightens her face. "It worked in Monsters University."

Kendall blinks. "What?"

"Did you not watch Monsters University? Mike and Scully end up getting jobs as mailmen and then working their way up the ladder to become scarers…no? Really?"

"I don't have time for Disney movies," Kendall sighs, moving to walk away, but Shelby jumps up to keep pace with her.

"It's Pixar, thanks," Shelby says, as if there's a big difference. "And that's a _tragedy_. I'm bringing in my DVD for you tomorrow."

"Please don't," Kendall says quickly, but Shelby is already waving goodbye as she heads to her car. Kendall has no doubt that she'll have a DVD of Monsters University on her desk tomorrow morning when Shelby is _supposed_ to be at her job.

-:-

As it turns out, Shelby brings her two DVDs, one for the original film and one for Monsters University, which, as it turns out, is a prequel. Kendall stares at them, unimpressed, as Shelby waves them under her nose before dropping them on her desk with a _thud_.

"Come _on_ , Miss Morgan. Everyone needs to watch kid's movies every now and then. It's good for your soul."

"Chicken soup is good for the soul," Kendall corrects. "These are just bizarrely-colored computer animations."

Shelby jabs a finger at her. "If you don't watch them by next week, I will annoy you every day about it."

Kendall knows it's not an empty threat, so she watches them. They're more enjoyable than she admits. Shelby grins and pesters her with questions for three straight days about her opinions, and then recommendations for other Pixar movies, but it's probably better than the alternative. Probably.

-:-

"Hey," Chase says one day, sliding into the lab with a half-amused, half-worried expression on his face. Koda comes in after him, looking delighted. "Uh, you like Shelby, right?"

Kendall looks up at him from her chair, bemused. "I don't hate her. What's going on?"

"Well," Chase coughs, looking over at Koda, who beams at him. "You know that pink energem we found yesterday?"

Kendall narrows her eyes at him. "What about it?"

"Shelby bond with energem!" Koda bursts out, too excited to wait for Chase. Kendall stares at him, utterly unsure of how to react. Not even sure how she _wants_ to react. "It is great!"

Chase cringes, waiting for her reaction. "We couldn't stop it – it got stolen and then she must have tracked it down and touched it because the next thing we know, our energems are glowing super bright, like they did when we found it and – "

Kendall holds up a hand. "Right," she says, cutting him off sharply. "Good. That's – that's good. She's not Fury, so that's good for us. Any other news?"

Chase and Koda exchange looks, then Chase adds brightly, "Oh, yeah, the red energem was found, too."

Kendall rolls her eyes. "You could have led with that."

-:-

It bothers Kendall more than she wants to admit, seeing Shelby with the pink energem, Shelby with the pink spandex. It's not even so much Shelby herself, although she still doesn't understand the energem's choice, but it's more that maybe a part of her buried deep, deep, deep down had hoped to follow in her sister's footprints.

She doesn't even _like_ pink. She purposely never entertained the idea of being a superhero when Keeper recruited her, even though she knows there are ten energems and if her sister was chosen by a sword, she might very well be chosen by a gemstone.

But she hadn't been. She'd talked herself into believing she didn't want it, but the truth is that it itches at her, watching someone else in pink, another girl who somehow has everything she never knew she wanted. First Kendrix, then the pink Megaforce ranger who could use Kendrix's power, and now Shelby.

She doesn't want it, not really, except some times in the middle of the night after she's finished a phone call with her sister or her mother or her grandmother, and she wants it so desperately she doesn't know how to feel any other way but _bitter_.

-:-

The truth is, though, that Shelby is a wonderful choice for pink ranger. All the reasons Kendall had hired her in the first place – bright, energetic, passionate, full of life – are even more true now that she has power to back up her recklessness, a color that makes her sparkle, and a way to channel her passion for dinosaurs into something even more amazing than just digging up bones.

And Shelby is smart, and brave, and funny, and Kendall finds herself feeling less bitter and more just sort of wistful as she watches Shelby run off to fight battles with the boys, coming back to help her with the E-Tracer, finding ideas that she would never have thought of on her own.

"You would make a great scientist," she admits one day as they're working on finding a new dig site for the pterodactyl.

Shelby looks at her, surprised. "Really? I just wanted to be an archaeologist."

"You're smart," Kendall says, shrugging. "You know the scientific method. You're able to apply reason and logic to the phenomenon you see on a daily basis. All qualities of a good scientist."

Shelby frowns, leaning against a table as she watches Kendall move around the base. "How come _you_ aren't a scientist? You have all that and more. And you come up with all our upgrades and zord improvements."

Kendall smiles, but doesn't look at Shelby. "I appreciate that, but I had other things in mind. Plus, with my family… there was no point in me getting a doctorate. I already had a job, and then I met Keeper, and, well, here we are."

Shelby wanders closer, thoughtful. "Your family… the owners of the museum, right? You must be, like, super rich. But that doesn't mean you can't be a scientist."

Kendall sighs. "No, but I had other things on my mind by the time I finished my masters. Besides, the stuff I do here is way more important than taking college classes and some tests."

Shelby stops in front of her, making her jump a little in surprise at her proximity. "That makes sense. But I still feel like you should be Dr. Morgan."

Kendall smiles wryly. "You don't like Miss Morgan?"

Shelby snorts. "I hate Miss Morgan," she teases, then shoots her a grin. "Kendall's okay. Even though she won't let me call her that."

Kendall almost laughs. "Get back to work, Shelby."

Shelby smiles at her and heads back to the computer. Kendall watches her go and feels, for the first time, like maybe the universe doesn't hate her anymore. That maybe everything – her father leaving, her mother being the way she is, her sister leaving and dying and coming back, meeting Keeper and Chase and Koda, every secret along the way – has all been leading up to this. Up to something good, something that makes her happy.

Maybe Shelby is the one wearing pink, but she's also the one at Kendall's side finding the aqua – silver – grey – _purple_ energems with her. Maybe it's all leading up to something really, really amazing.

-:-

She's stopped keeping so many secrets. Turns out, her mother was wrong. Kendall isn't anything like them – she has a superhero sister and a superhero team, which means, at the end of it all, she's a superhero herself.

The stars never seemed so close. She looks up at the night sky and imagines she can see her sister smiling.

* * *

please **DON'T** favorite without reviewing, thank you. i'd really love some feedback!


End file.
